Until recently I've been using WordPress for my nonprofit's website, but have noticed most my site's content is fairly static (I think), and would probably benefit from being served as a static page instead of having to retrieve data from a Sql database.
(Yah I use a caching plugin, but those things are notoriously complicated to set up and manage things like expiration and recaching).
Which got me thinking... Theoretically, what parts of my site actually need to be 'dynamic' to run? And more importantly would there actually be a speed benefit from converting the pages that don't have to be dynamic from wordpress to regular html?
(Note: I'm ignoring the time it would take to convert dynamic files into static ones, just focusing on the visitor's experience).
Eg.
-Things like a home or about page, with their headers and footers and jquery and CSS design - could in theory be static.
-Blog posts could also be static and even a list of new posts and snippets could be generated off the server and converted to a static page.
-User facing options - creating events, a donation form, purchasing items with limited inventory - do these all have to be dynamic? If they're embedded into the page then does the whole page slow down from the dynamic request, or can just that section (eg a login modal) be run dynamically.
Yes, it sounds like you could serve up those pages statically. The reason I like using a content management system like Wordpress is that it separates the design from the content and it's easy to make edits. Separating the design from the content means that you can easily make design changes to your whole site by tweaking the CSS of your theme or changing the theme entirely.And even if you only edit the 'About' page once in a blue moon, it's nice to be able to do it quickly and easily. Database calls to get content shouldn't slow things down in a way that would be noticeable compared to a static page.
If you really want to make some pages static, you could try a plugin like this for Wordpress that can wrap your Wordpress theme around a static page:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/static-pages/
But I think you are overthinking the Static/Dynamic thing a little bit.
Hope this helps,
Kristen
Related
A client asked me to redesign her web site, built several years ago in WP by another developer. Although I've never worked with WP before, I'm pretty comfortable with html, css, and php, and I more or less understand how WP stores content and dynamically builds pages. But I'm wondering how to approach these challenges:
My client's site has about 75 pages. There are about 25 that are static (i.e. the content changes infrequently if at all; things like "about us" and "faqs") and there are about 50 pages that are more "blog-like", except that instead of posts, the content contains directory-type info (e.g. 12 DJs in the area) or event-related info (e.g. upcoming shows at local theaters). Both of these categories contain many sub (and sometimes sub-sub) categories (e.g. medical services > pediatric > kid allergy specialists) and the content updates fairly frequently.
I understand the difference in WP between "pages" and "posts". But I need to find out the best way to structure the static content. Should I just set up a parent/child hierarchy of pages, changing the permalinks to something that makes sense? Or is it better / easier to just build the static pages outside WP and somehow link to them from the common navigation?
As a web designer, I want to "wow" my client with a great design. While there are loads of wonderful WP themes available, I really need to create something unique. But I'm wary of breaking something, so what's the best way to take an existing theme and just tweak it enough to make it look a little different?
Finally, other than mounting a massive "copy and paste" effort when the new site is built, is there a way to transfer content from the original site to the new one?
I would create a Child Theme (https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/how-to-create-wordpress-child-theme). And just do your changes in this theme.
You can download the complete Website with a plugin like duplicator and install it local (xampp).
Is hard to give you the right way. There are so many ways a theme can look like. Different page builder plugins or Advanced Custom Fields.
Maybe the only thing you can do, is to update (Theme, Plugin)everything and lift the page. Especially if it is a purchased theme with any page builder. But don't change anything in the main theme. Create a child theme!
I understand the difference in WP between "pages" and "posts". But I
need to find out the best way to structure the static content. Should
I just set up a parent/child hierarchy of pages, changing the
permalinks to something that makes sense? Or is it better / easier to
just build the static pages outside WP and somehow link to them from
the common navigation?
It's not something like that. Consider the child theme as inherited (like a PHP class) from the parent theme. Imagine every .php file in a child theme is like overriding a function from parent class which is parent theme in this example.
For more information check the codex out or google "wordpress theme vs child theme" there are lots of articles explaining the difference.
In a typical WordPress project I guess there are 3 parties. Party 1 is the graphic designer providing psd/pdf or html that party 2 (the developer) will create a theme from with probably some custom posts so party 3 (the client and content editor) can update the site without messing up the design and with no knowledge about HTML, JavaScript, Gimp or PHP.
This would tie the main theme of the site or it's specific pages in the php page(s) and if some minor design changes need to be made it needs to be done through editing php files.
I was thinking the following for a theme design:
(assuming a content only site without having complicated sales statistics and such)
Instead of "programming" the page.php to fit the graphic design and bring in specific (custom) posts and other data I would have the page.php bring in sub content. This so the graphic designer can create the page without having to program.
When images need to be provided then wordpress can pre scale/crop for different screen sizes.
The entire page should be created from the editor by the designer NOT the editor/client and not in page.php:
<html {{lang}}>
<title>{{title}}</title>
...
{{main-slider}}
JS and css are added through custom fields so they can be merged to one file.
Main slider post looks like this:
<div id="main-slider">{{main-slider-content}}</div>
JS and css can be provided to overrule page css or js and will be merged to one file.
And the main-slider-content is content that the editor can provide through a custom post provided by the programmer that will hold the editor's hand all the way and makes sure everything goes right.
Some of these fields can be set with custom fields values of the page (reverting to defaults if missing) some will be overwritten by the post (like language or title).
The type of sites that will be produced by this theme are used by small business owners who would like some web presence.
I have a couple of doubts about the design and hope someone with more experience with wordpress can shed some light on this.
When the editor/client edits a custom post like some slider content they cannot preview the item because that content is basically used on every page. Even if I find a way to list pages where the slider is used and show that one it won't show the new content until it's published. Previewing pages seems a bit complicated to implement.
It takes longer to generate the pages because content and sub content needs to be fetched from the database after parsing the content. I've tried to do this with DOMDocument before and used <div data-custom-content="main-slider"></div> but that is too slow so I'll try with regexp.
Because content isn't going to change that much I thought maybe APC cache the page after a first request and serve it from there. Delete the cache only when something is updated. On VPS the cache could be (probably would be) trashed when the site is inactive for a long time (which would be quite often). This means that requests take a long time to process when people try to view the pages.
Anyone with experience or helpful tips in this
[UPDATE]
I see that particular design and the html template will still have strong dependencies on each other. I am thinking now of trying out Twig. The benefit will be that re usable components are classes that can be added to the project and full content is controlled in the wordpress editor in a way that someone with no programming experience can still manage the content.
When data needed in the page is going to change a programmer is going to be needed though.
This is kind of what the Advanced Custom Fields Flexible Content system does, and the way you've styled your examples looks very like Smarty, a templating system that used to be very popular, and which is still used by a few systems like Prestashop.
In my experience, this removing the middleman kind of idea doesn't work. You either need a very extensive - and therefore bloated - initial theming system to flex to different projects, or you need a basic one which a developer will customise later - in which case the best you can achieve is moving the developer's role to a different phase of the project.
Overall, I think the best scope for this type of idea is for designers to learn a bit more code.
I am new to Umbraco CMS. I have an existing website which is developed in asp and asp.net.
Now I have requirement to convert this existing website to new website using Umbraco CMS.
The pages available in existing website are almost all static pages..
My question : Is there any way to import these static pages into my Umbraco website.
So that I can skip the manual content creation of these pages in Umbraco.
In short, it depends on how much you need to edit on the original pages and how many pages there are.
If the content is never going to be edited, then you can maybe create most as just normal masterpages (umbraco templates). You can then just add in Navigations and other CMS spec
Or another way of doing it would be to create 1 template and add a big text box to the DocType which you can then paste the HTML into. However this will mean you will end up with loads of HTML in the DB.
If you want to make it a 'true' Umbraco site and use as much of the CMS functionality as possible then there is no really easy way of converting HTML into an Umbraco site.
If the data was in a DB you could use CMSImport and map the old to the new DocType fields, but you would still probably have to do some HTMLTidy work on it before importing.
Depending on the amount of pages, the best and easiest way is usually to just copy and paste in my opinion because it allows you the chance to perform a content audit at the same time and clean up HTML where necessary.
I did this before.
Created a basic template / view with header and footer and main content area.
Then use Screaming Frog (or a similar tool) to crawl the site.
Use the output of the page crawl to make a comma delimited list of Urls
then use this to find each page.
For each page, create an Umbraco page with the name of the url, ie /something-page-name = 'Something Page Name' Use HTML Agility pack to navigate the HTML and pull out key elements such as Title, Description etc and locate the main content by navigating the DOM and literally take the InnerHTML of that section into the content field of the Umrbaco page and save and publish it.
Make sure you allow your content editor in Umbraco to edit all the html elements found in the source page. Ie you may have section or small tags which the editor may not recognise.
I'm new to web design. I basically just jumped into this learning as I went. People recommended CMS's like Joomla & Drupal and I installed them spent a few hours trying to figure them out and gave up. I then proceeded to just design my web site in a text editor b/c it was easier just to learn html, css, js, etc. Well now I've got somewhere between 20 & 30 webpages I need to get published to the web. I have three CMS's installed on my host server and I've sort of decided to use drupal. So I've got drupal open and the example drupal home page. I can not figure out how to just change that page to my html page I've already created.
I feel like this is such a stupid question but I have googled myself into carpal tunnel. Can someone point in the right direction?
You can do this very easily by using a PHP snippet in the article, blog entry or whatever. You need to activate the PHPfilter module, and to make sure that the content type you are working with accepts PHP code... and that you as a Drupal user is allowed to use PHP code.
Otherwise, its simple, put something like this in the body of the content:
<?php
print file_get_contents("/path/to/file.html");
?>
A CMS does not manage html pages, it manages content. In case of Drupal, content is nodes, blocks, users, ...
The next important thing in a CMS/Drupal is separation of content and design. With a CMS like Drupal, you create/use a so called theme, which is a template for your content that defines HTMl structures, CSS and so on. That is more or less the same for all pages of a website.
Once you have that, the advantage of a CMS kicks in. You can now create content, as much as you want (more or less) and it will all be displayed using that previously created/downloaded theme. Without having to write HTML/CSS for every new page. And you can change your design/structure in a single place, and every single page of your website will be affected at the same time.
As you can see, that is completely different from what you have done with static HTML files. Which also means, that there is no easy way to "import" it into Drupal. You basically have to re-create the complete site, this time with using Drupal, and then add your content to it. And you will have to learn Drupal while doing that.
So, when you are finished with your website as static pages, just upload them to a hoster and be done with it. And maybe start with a CMS from the beginning with the next project...
A client asked me to redesign her web site, built several years ago in WP by another developer. Although I've never worked with WP before, I'm pretty comfortable with html, css, and php, and I more or less understand how WP stores content and dynamically builds pages. But I'm wondering how to approach these challenges:
My client's site has about 75 pages. There are about 25 that are static (i.e. the content changes infrequently if at all; things like "about us" and "faqs") and there are about 50 pages that are more "blog-like", except that instead of posts, the content contains directory-type info (e.g. 12 DJs in the area) or event-related info (e.g. upcoming shows at local theaters). Both of these categories contain many sub (and sometimes sub-sub) categories (e.g. medical services > pediatric > kid allergy specialists) and the content updates fairly frequently.
I understand the difference in WP between "pages" and "posts". But I need to find out the best way to structure the static content. Should I just set up a parent/child hierarchy of pages, changing the permalinks to something that makes sense? Or is it better / easier to just build the static pages outside WP and somehow link to them from the common navigation?
As a web designer, I want to "wow" my client with a great design. While there are loads of wonderful WP themes available, I really need to create something unique. But I'm wary of breaking something, so what's the best way to take an existing theme and just tweak it enough to make it look a little different?
Finally, other than mounting a massive "copy and paste" effort when the new site is built, is there a way to transfer content from the original site to the new one?
By reading your question, it seems to me that choosing WP for this kind of website was a bad choice.
Redesigning it, though, won't be that hard if it's using page templates for pages.
And yes, there's a import/export tool in WP to tranfer content. (see administration panel)
I, really, advise you to read this great tutorial about creating WP themes.
I've a blog-like WP site myself (contains RPG development articles). Here's what I did. Nested static pages simply have parent-child hierarchy: /about/mingos - that's easy to understand and i value this kind of content organisation (personal opinion).
As for themes, there's a no-brainer tool that, while not exactly apt for real business, has the capability of letting you see how stuff will look in seconds, and can sometimes give you great ideas. It's called Artisteer and there's a demo on its site that you can have a look at. Try your design ideas with it, see how stuff will look like. I'm sure you can come up with some great ideas for a "wow" design :).
Exporting content, as Soufiane Hassou remarked, is possible from within the admin panel.
Don't rule out using categories to create your hierarchy. That way you'd get the benefit of cross categorization of DJs and venues by location to create a robust cross reference system. Pages don't get this benefit without extra work.
To make this in to a directory, though, is gonna either be heavy work on managing the pages or heavy work on creating a solution that will cross reference everything and bring the content together in a usable way on the front end.